Sessions Plan To Make Street Drugs Less Potent And More Expensive Is Deeply Flawed

Attorney General Jeff Sessions delivered a lengthy speech on drug policy today at a conference for DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), the anti-drug program that was big in the 80s and 90s.

While much of the speech was Sessions standard law-and-order messaging, one line, about the role of the Justice Department in decreasing illicit drug use, really stood out:

Now, law enforcement is prevention. And at the Department of Justice, we are working keep drugs out of our country to reduce availability, to drive up its price, and to reduce its purity and addictiveness.

This is a standard supply-side anti-drug mantra: make drugs illegal, drive up their price, make them harder to manufacture and harder to get.

The data shows that the prices of other drugs, like cocaine and methamphetamines, fell similarly during this period.

You see a similar, though less-pronounced trend when examining illicit drug purity.

The average purity of street-level heroin seizures rose from 10 percent in 1981 to 31 percent in 2012, a threefold increase. Again, most of that increase in purity happened during the tough-on-crime era of the 80s and 90s.

In fact, heroin purity showed a steady decline throughout most of the 2000s, right when policymakers were starting to abandon the harsh rhetoric for more treatment-based options.

By Sessions goalposts of raising price and reducing purity, the Justice Department has been failing miserably at its job for much of the past 30 years.

Numbers like these are why a number of reform groups, including the ACLU and the Drug Policy Alliance, say an enforcement-centric approach to drug policy, like the one Sessions advocates for, is incapable of dealing with an increasingly deadly national opiate epidemic. They’d rather decriminalize personal drug use to get drug users out of prisons and into the treatment they need.

But with Sessions at the helm of the Justice Department, such policy is further away than ever. It is not enough that dangerous drugs are illegal, Sessions said before the DARE conference today. We have to create a cultural climate that is hostile to drug abuse.